Membership-concealing overlay networks

We introduce the concept of membership-concealing overlay networks (MCONs), which hide the real-world identities of participants. We argue that while membership concealment is orthogonal to anonymity and censorship resistance, pseudonymous communication and censorship resistance become much easier if done over a membership-concealing network. We formalize the concept of membership concealment, discuss a number of attacks against existing systems and present real-world attack results. We then propose three proof-of-concept MCON designs that resist those attacks: one that is more efficient, another that is more robust to membership churn, and a third that balances efficiency and robustness. We show theoretical and simulation results demonstrating the feasibility and performance of our schemes. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.4 [Computer-communication Networks]: Distributed Systems—Distributed Applications; C.2.0 [Computer-Communication Networks]: General—Security and Protecti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Eugene Y. Vasserman, Rob Jansen, James Tyra, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim
• Keywords: CCS 2009, Censorship Resistance, Membership Concealment, Membership-concealing Overlay Networks, Security Privacy